Academy Fellow

My research is centred on understanding how people form expectations about the future and how these expectations shape the decisions they make in everyday life. These decisions, whether about education, health, work, or family, often involve uncertainty. By measuring expectations directly in surveys, my work provides new insights into human behaviour and offers practical guidance for designing more effective social and economic policies.

A major focus of my career has been to contribute to changing the way economists and social scientists measure expectations about the future. Traditional surveys often asked people to predict outcomes in vague or qualitative terms. I have pioneered new methods that use visual and interactive tools to elicit probabilistic expectations, including in contexts where literacy and numeracy are limited. These innovations have been implemented in large-scale household surveys across the world, and they have opened up whole new areas of research into how people perceive risks and opportunities.

I have also shown how expectations data can be embedded into rigorous models of decision-making. My early work on contraceptive choice demonstrated how subjective probabilities could be used to estimate preferences and predict behaviour in ways that standard data could not. This approach has since become widely adopted in the study of education, labour markets, and health, and has helped bridge the gap between theoretical models and real-world decision-making. An important extension of this work examines how expectations can be shifted through information interventions. For example, my work in Malawi, a high HIV-prevalence environment, shows that providing information about mortality risk altered individuals’ expectations in ways that reduced risky sexual behaviour. More broadly, my research highlights how well-designed interventions can reshape beliefs and, in turn, lead to changes in behaviour with significant implications for public policy.

Beyond individual projects, I have played an important role in building new data infrastructure that is widely used by researchers and policymakers. I have contributed to the design of expectations modules in landmark studies such as the US Health and Retirement Study, the UK Understanding Society survey, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and the Longitudinal Aging Study in India. I also co-created the UK BOOST2018 study, which tracks young people’s expectations about higher education and the labour market. These datasets continue to underpin cutting-edge research across the social sciences. I am committed to multi-disciplinary research and currently collaborate with demographers, linguists, and medical doctors to enrich the scope and impact of this work.

Taken together, my research has played an important role in shaping how economists and social scientists think about expectations, uncertainty, and decision-making. It highlights the crucial role of expectations in shaping behaviour and demonstrates the value of incorporating these insights into the design of better policies.

Professor of Economics, University of Technology Sydney (2019 – Present)

Professor of Economics, Nova School of Business and Economics (2024 – Present)

President of the European Society for Population Economics (2025)

Executive Board member of the Asian and Australasian Society of Labour Economics (2022 – present)

Bhalotra, S, Delavande, A, Font Gilabert, P & Maselko, J 2025, ‘Maternal investments in children: the role of expected effort and return’, Economic Journal, vol. 135, no. 167.

Ciancio, A, Delavande, A, Kohler, H-P & Kohler, IV 2024, ‘Mortality risk information, survival expectations and sexual behaviours’, Economic Journal.

Delavande, A 2022, ‘Expectations in development economics’, in W van der Klaauw, G Topa & R Bachmann (eds), Handbook of Economic Expectations, Elsevier, Amsterdam.

Delavande, A & Zafar, B 2019, ‘University choice: the role of expected earnings, non-pecuniary outcomes and financial constraints’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 127, no. 5, pp. 2343–2393.

Delavande, A & Kohler, H-P 2016, ‘HIV-related expectations and risky sexual behavior in Malawi’, Review of Economic Studies, vol. 83, no. 1, pp. 118–164.